Q&A with Joyce Hinnefeld

 

Photo by Armen Elliott

 

 

Joyce Hinnefeld is the author of The Dime Museum, a new novel in stories. Her other books include The Beauty of Their Youth. She is an emeritus professor of English at Moravian University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. 

 

Q: What inspired you to write The Dime Museum?

 

A: I tend to mull over possible book ideas for a LONG time (we’re talking years here), so it’s not always easy for me to remember the initial seed of an idea.

 

But for The Dime Museum I do remember writing applications for leave time and funding support (before I retired from full-time teaching at Moravian University) for a project about the “unseen women” behind, or alongside, big cultural figures of the 20th century U.S. like Albert Barnes, Wallace Stevens, and Ezra Pound.

 

With that came some deeper looking into certain settings that were key for these figures (Philadelphia and Reading, Pennsylvania, for instance), as setting/locale is always important for me as a writer.

 

Other settings eventually entered the picture—like Chicago and two European cities, Venice and Lisbon. (A piece of advice: always be sure to build a book around at least a couple exciting places that you simply must go to for research!)

 

Q: The book is described as “a novel in stories”--did you plan to write a novel in stories, or did you start with a story and decide to continue with those characters?

 

A: I believe I originally intended to make the book a story cycle or collection of linked stories—there are different labels.

 

But as the characters and the book developed, I realized that it really was more a novel in stories than a linked story collection, in that only some of the stories (or chapters) really stood alone as independent short stories; others needed to live and breathe in the company of other parts of the book.

 

That was an organic discovery that came from the process of writing the first two stories/chapters in the book, “L’acqua Alta” and “The Dime Museum,” and in doing so recognizing characters and situations that I wanted to explore in more depth.

 

Q: How was the book’s title (also the title of one of the stories) chosen, and what does it signify for you?

 

A: For quite a while I was calling the title story “The Bogus Man”—the name of the central character Maude’s vaudeville and dime store/sideshow persona.

 

Maude’s early life as a so-called male impersonator, or “bogus man,” was the result of some research I did into vaudevillian troupes and shows; the impetus for that research was the true story of the vaudeville actress who spent two nights in the Wabash, Indiana, rooms of Ezra Pound (and I’m afraid I really don’t remember how or when I first learned about her).

 

Reading about popular male impersonators was a fascinating and fun rabbit hole; there were some very successful performers in the late 19th and early 20th century U.S., appearing in shows in San Francisco, Chicago, and elsewhere. Reading about their lives on- and off-stage was a fascinating—and dangerous, time-wise—distraction.

 

Q: The writer Joan Silber said of the book, “How beautifully knit The Dime Museum is--as soon as I finished it, I went right back to the beginning, to see the full span of it and to put together the wonderful complications of the characters.” What do you think of that description?

 

A: I’m delighted by this description—primarily because it comes from Joan Silber, whose work I’ve admired for years.

 

I think she is a master of the linked story collection form; two favorites of mine are Ideas of Heaven and Fools (this one I’ve read multiple times, and I think Silber’s inclusion of Dorothy Day as a sort of peripheral character in the collection helped give me the confidence to include Ezra Pound as a character in The Dime Museum).

 

“Wonderful complications” is exactly what I was trying for with the characters in The Dime Museum—no one in the book (not even the traitorous Ezra Pound) is simple, or unequivocally good or bad. And I really love her reference to going back to the beginning to recognize the book’s “full span.”

 

This has me thinking that maybe I am capable of writing a literary mystery, which is something I’ve started working on.

 

Q: Can you say more about that?

 

A: It’s too early for me to say much about this, but I have a character and situations in mind for—maybe—a series of literary mysteries. These won’t be “true crime”-ish (I’m too tender-hearted, or squeamish, or both for that), but I don’t think they’ll exactly be “cozy” either.

 

I’m really still in the note-taking and very preliminary drafting stage now, but I’m willing to say that I hope the title I have in mind for the first one sticks: Peach Season.

 

Besides that I’m trying to pull together plans for a semi-regular newsletter to share with readers. That’s a really crowded landscape now, so I’m hoping to keep these brief, with questions and/or writing prompts for readers on topics that are pressing for me right now: themes in The Dime Museum, of course; care-taking; libraries; and the lived experiences of incarcerated people.

 

Q: Anything else we should know?

 

A: My husband Jim Hauser, who’s older than I am, has been in the throes of cognitive decline and limited mobility since a bad fall in November 2023—and I’ve been in pretty much full-time care-taking mode since then.

 

Hence my plan for some newsletter posts that address this new reality of being someone’s main care-taker. It’s interesting to me that care-taking is also a recurring motif in The Dime Museum. This is clearly something I’ve been thinking about for a long time, even before it became such an immediate reality for me.

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb. Here's a previous Q&A with Joyce Hinnefeld.